In recent weeks and months there has been quite a bit of work towards improving the responsiveness of the Linux desktop with some very significant milestones building up recently and new patches continuing to come. This work is greatly improving the experience of the Linux desktop when the computer is withstanding a great deal of CPU load and memory strain. Fortunately, the exciting improvements are far from over. There is a new patch that has not yet been merged but has undergone a few revisions over the past several weeks and it is quite small -- just over 200 lines of code -- but it does wonders for the Linux desktop.

Will this increase performance on my old AMD Athlon XP machine, or does it only really help those with multicore cpu's?

11-16-2010, 03:36 AM

crispy

So now it will actually be practiical to multitask in linux? ;)

11-16-2010, 03:50 AM

ad_267

It doesn't seem like this would make much difference to general users who aren't running big jobs in another tty though, it's a pretty specific use case. Most of the big jobs I run are on another machine through SSH. Still pretty awesome though.

11-16-2010, 04:27 AM

fish_sticks

Will there be a significant difference in fps with the patch?

11-16-2010, 04:31 AM

ad_267

Quote:

Originally Posted by fish_sticks

Will there be a significant difference in fps with the patch?

Yes if you're compiling the Linux kernel at the same time.

11-16-2010, 04:32 AM

korpenkraxar

Quote:

Originally Posted by ad_267

It doesn't seem like this would make much difference to general users who aren't running big jobs in another tty though, it's a pretty specific use case. Most of the big jobs I run are on another machine through SSH. Still pretty awesome though.

Hang on. So no performance boost for most of us?

11-16-2010, 04:46 AM

Chousuke

Quote:

Originally Posted by korpenkraxar

Hang on. So no performance boost for most of us?

It's not so much a performance boost than it is better balancing of resources. Your computer is not any faster, but it will distribute CPU power more evenly so that everything will *feel* faster.

If you ever run any CPU- and/or IO-intensive program in the background (say, a system upgrade, or a locatedb cron job), this patch should be helpful.

11-16-2010, 04:54 AM

korpenkraxar

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chousuke

If you ever run any CPU- and/or IO-intensive program in the background (say, a system upgrade, or a locatedb cron job), this patch should be helpful.

Yeah, this is what I meant. Responsiveness is a better term than performance I guess. No more tears when updatedb kicks in?

11-16-2010, 05:02 AM

dagger

Just tested this patch and from what I can see it doesn't make anything faster. It makes everything *MUCH* smoother by reducing resources to processes which use a lot of CPU - (like make -j64 on linux kernel). Compilation takes a bit longer, but system is fully usable during that time.

This is by far one of the best patches I've tested so far! Outstanding work. Thanks for bringing that up!